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Billionaire Commerce Nominee Howard Lutnick Simply Too Conflicted to Confirm
Tonight the Senate will hold a final confirmation vote on perhaps the most conflicted Trump cabinet nominee to date, Howard Lutnick. The billionaire nominated to lead the U.S. Commerce Department holds massive interests in cryptocurrency, computer chipmaker Nvidia, and the satellite industry – presenting unavoidable conflicts of interest with the sprawling Department’s oversight, rules, and research of each of these industries. While Lutnick has claimed he would divest from his multi-billion-dollar empire if confirmed, he made no such pledge for his children, who apparently will continue to run it.
“Any vote for the latest billionaire that won’t look out for working families vying to join the Trump cabinet is a vote to create a perfect storm for corruption and self-dealing that will do no favors for everyday American consumers and small businesses. Howard Lutnick has no business overseeing Commerce rules and research involving major industries that his family’s company is deeply invested in – he’s simply too conflicted to confirm. The Senate has an opportunity to send a message that the Trump administration has already exceeded its limit on super-wealthy Wall Street insiders that have no interest in helping working people get ahead,” said Accountable.US Executive Director Tony Carrk.
A VOTE FOR LUTNICK IS A VOTE FOR:
Potential Conflict Of Interest Between Lutnick’s Chinese Business Interests And Commerce Department Role Protecting U.S. Trade:
- Lutnick has developed a reputation as a “China hawk” and gave “full-throated support” for President-elect Trump’s proposed tariffs, including a 60% tariff on goods imported from China, arguing they help protect American industries from foreign competition. Following reports that the President-elect could narrow these tariffs to certain sectors, President-elect Trump doubled down and denied that he was considering “pared-back tariffs,” although universal tariffs could spur “price shocks” and further inflation. Despite Lutnick’s rhetoric and despite the fact that he will lead offices that will be “the tip of the spear in the U.S.-China trade war,” Lutnick’s firms have “profited from ties to China.” This includes financial services company BGC Group, which has “a joint venture in Beijing with Chinese-state owned China Credit Trust” and his firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which has “helped take Chinese firms public” in the U.S. Although Lutnick has claimed that he will divest from these companies and resign from his roles leading them, he remains deeply “entwined” with Cantor Fitzgerald. Dozens of current and former employees and associates told Bloomberg that Lutnick’s “knot of conflicts is unlikely to loosen easily” and his grip on his businesses is “bolted tight.” On top of this, Lutnick appear poised to keep the business close in his family, with his 26-year-old son being listed as the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald’s latest blank-check company in December 2024.
Potential Conflict Of Interest Between Lutnick’s Interests In Chipmaker Nvidia And Commerce Department Enforcement Of Trade Restrictions Against China:
- In Lutnick’s most recent quarterly filing, his firm Cantor Fitzgerald reported almost $1.2 billion in holdings connected to chipmaker Nvidia, which was Cantor’s second-biggest holding at the time. This investment poses a stark conflict of interest to Lutnick’s potential role leading the Department of Commerce, which is central to enforcing trade restrictions against China and other U.S. competitors.
In January 2025, the Biden Commerce Department unveiled “unprecedented new export controls” on computer chips and other technology in order to slow China’s development of artificial intelligence capabilities. An Nvidia executive directly criticized the policy as an “‘extreme ‘country cap,’” referring to the Commerce Department’s new quotas on sales of AI technology to various countries through which China may circumvent the Biden administration’s existing trade restrictions on advanced chips. Nvidia has also spent at least $240,000 while directly lobbying the Department of Commerce and other federal policymakers on chip trade policy in the first three quarters of 2024 alone.
Potential Conflict Of Interest Between Lutnick’s Cryptocurrency Interests And Commerce Department Oversight Of Crypto-Related Issues:
- Lutnick developed a reputation as a vocal advocate of cryptocurrencies including telling an industry conference that bitcoin, the leading form of crypto, should be traded all over the world “‘without exception and without limitation.” Lutnick has also been called a “key ally” of massive crypto firm Tether, in which his firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds about $600 million and with which Cantor was developing a new $2 billion lending project in November 2024.
Lutnick’s financial interests in cryptocurrency pose a variety of conflicts with his potential role leading the Department of Commerce, which has a significant role in crypto policymaking and in researching crypto technologies.
In 2022, President Biden issued an executive order on digital assets instructing the Secretary of Commerce to establish a framework for “‘enhancing United States competitiveness in, and leveraging of, digital asset technologies.’” President Trump has since replaced this order with a new one directing relevant departments and agencies to recommend digital asset policies that should be “rescinded or modified.”
Additionally, the Commerce department has had a role in crypto policymaking, previously issuing a report on “Responsible Advancement Of U.S. Competitiveness In Digital Assets,” with Secretary Gina Raimondo calling for “‘effective regulatory approaches’” to crypto technologies. Additionally, the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has multiple advanced projects researching blockchain, the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies.
Potential Conflict Of Interest Between Lutnick’s Satellite Industry Interests And Commerce Department’s Oversight Of Commercial Space Policy:
- The Department of Commerce controls the Office of Space Commerce (OSC), which sets space commerce policy, and the department has various responsibilities that affect the satellite and commercial space industry.
Lutnick and various Cantor Fitzgerald entities were shown to hold about 78 million shares, valued at about $80 million, in space imaging company Satellogic in a November 2024 filing. Cantor Fitzgerald also sponsored Satellogic’s $1.1 billion public launch in 2021, with Lutnick calling the company “‘uniquely positioned to dominate the earth observation industry.’” Although Lutnick resigned from Satellogic’s board following his nomination to be Secretary of Commerce, it does not appear that Cantor has disclosed divesting these shares in Satellogic.
Notably, Satellogic began relocating to the U.S. just last year in order to compete for federal contracts after taking a $30 million strategic investment from massive cryptocurrency firm Tether, in which his firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds about $600 million, which was developing a multi-billion dollar deal with Cantor in November 2024, and for which Lutnick’s son has been an employee.
Lutnick is also “close” to Elon Musk, whose SpaceX and Starlink businesses have direct interests in the Commerce Department’s commercial space policies. SpaceX has made regulatory comments to at least three major Commerce Dept. offices.
Accountable.US is a nonpartisan watchdog that exposes corruption in public life and holds government officials and corporate special interests accountable by bringing their influence and misconduct to light. In doing so, we make way for policies that advance the interests of all Americans, not just the rich and powerful.
LATEST NEWS
Experts Say Trump Cuts to Food Aid Have 'Completely Subsumed' RFK Jr.'s MAHA Agenda
A new report argues it is "impossible to reconcile" the Trump administration's Make America Healthy Again rhetoric with unprecedented cuts to federal nutrition assistance.
Jul 02, 2026
The unprecedented cuts to federal nutrition assistance that President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans enacted nearly a year ago directly undermine the administration's "Make America Healthy Again" initiative, argues a new report by a pair of food policy experts.
The so-called MAHA project, spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., emphasizes the importance of a healthy diet to childhood development. But the new white paper, published Wednesday and authored by Joelle Johnson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Priya Fielding-Singh of George Washington University's Global Food Institute, notes that research shows the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) "reduces food insecurity—which is itself linked to increased risk of poorer diets among children—and may improve health outcomes among households with low incomes."
"How the administration’s health objectives can be achieved alongside policies that reduce both food access and nutrition education is a question these dual agendas do not resolve," the report states. "Understanding this tension also helps explain why the administration’s MAHA messaging has at times appeared disconnected from the SNAP policies it has simultaneously pursued."
The GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR 1) will inflict nearly $190 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade—the largest in the program's history—and expand work reporting requirements, despite evidence showing that such mandates do virtually nothing to boost employment or reduce poverty. According to one estimate, the expanded SNAP work reporting requirements could cause nearly 70,000 avoidable deaths by 2040.
The Republican law also forces states to pay a portion of SNAP benefits for the first time, straining budgets and potentially forcing deeper food aid cuts.
Millions of people across the US—including more than 800,000 children—have lost SNAP benefits since Trump signed the Republican budget package into law on July 4, 2025. It is well established that food insecurity, which is on the rise across the US, is associated with chronic disease.
“It is impossible to reconcile the administration’s MAHA rhetoric on reducing chronic disease in childhood with the cruel cutbacks to SNAP brought about by HR 1,” Johnson, who serves as deputy director for healthy food access at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), said in a statement. “Whatever MAHA initiatives CSPI might have otherwise supported are completely subsumed by the biggest cut to SNAP in the program’s history.”
"Cutting off food assistance for millions of families undermines MAHA's stated goals of improving diet quality and preventing chronic disease."
The new report stresses the "ripple effects" of the Trump-GOP SNAP cuts across the food safety net, pointing to negative impacts on kids' eligibility for school meals and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
"Approximately 16 million children live in households that rely on SNAP to meet their basic food needs, and many will face cascading losses of access to other nutrition programs as a result of HR 1's cuts," the report warns. "Children who lose SNAP also risk losing automatic enrollment in WIC and free school meals, forcing families already stretched thin to navigate multiple re-enrollment processes with no guarantee of restored access."
Trump and the GOP are not finished attacking nutrition assistance for low-income families. Last month, House Republicans approved legislation that would slash fruit and vegetable benefits for millions of young children and pregnant and postpartum women—a cut consistent with the White House's budget proposal for the coming fiscal year.
"If we are serious about improving Americans' health, we need policies that make healthy food more accessible, not less," said Fielding-Singh, director of policy and programs at the Global Food Institute. "Cutting off food assistance for millions of families undermines MAHA's stated goals of improving diet quality and preventing chronic disease. Food security and public health go hand in hand."
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‘Going Out of Its Way to Enable Trump,’ Supreme Court Has Used Secretive Shadow Docket Like Never Before
"That hugely consequential cases are decided with no transparency," said one civil rights lawyer, "only adds to the court's illegitimacy and further decreases the public's confidence."
Jul 02, 2026
As its conservative majority showed unprecedented deference to President Donald Trump, the US Supreme Court passed what ProPublica described as a "troubling milestone" during the term that ended last October.
For the first time in its modern history, an analysis published Wednesday found, the court decided more cases using its secretive "shadow docket" than using the regular process.
Unlike the so-called "merits docket," in which cases undergo lengthy periods of review, parties file briefs and make oral arguments for their side, and the justices issue extensive signed rulings explaining their reasoning, shadow docket decisions are expedited and offer little mechanism for accountability.
They are often unsigned, with no final vote count or explanation of the court’s decision, and are often issued within hours of legal action being taken, leaving no time for deliberation or public input.
These cases are meant to be reserved for emergency or temporary interventions. But as Trump has attempted to exert unprecedented executive authority that often brazenly pushes legal boundaries, ProPublica found that the court's use of the shadow docket has exploded.
The analysis found that during the last Supreme Court term, the court issued 63 decisions on the shadow docket, compared with just 56 on the merits docket. Analyzing more than two decades of decisions by the high court, they found that the court has never come close to issuing this many secret decisions in any previous term.
This is due largely to the Trump administration's unprecedented petitioning to have cases decided on the shadow docket after elements of the president's agenda were stymied by lower courts.
As ProPublica explained, the court "has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked—and has done so with little to no explanation," and often the decisions have been highly consequential and "have thrown lower courts’ processes into turmoil and have sometimes directly contradicted longstanding legal precedent."
On June 23, 2025, after a lower court had ruled that eight men being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men were deported. The majority didn’t issue an opinion justifying its ruling.
Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while still-ongoing litigation against it proceeded. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” These became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Last year, ProPublica found more than 170 citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.
And in May, while an election in Louisiana was already underway, the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map, removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana can now use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives—an effort touched off by Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.
An analysis by the legal group Court Accountability in October found that the Supreme Court sided with Trump 90% of the time in the 23 orders included in its analysis of his second administration through October 2025, nearly all of which were issued on the shadow docket.
“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst, told ProPublica.
Noting that the American public’s approval of the high court has fallen substantially in recent years, Leslie Proll, a civil rights lawyer and the former director of voting rights at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called the court’s unprecedented secrecy “utterly disgraceful.”
"That hugely consequential cases are decided with no transparency," she said, "only adds to the court's illegitimacy and further decreases the public's confidence."
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Jobs Report Offers 'Grim Warning Signs' for Cash-Strapped Working Families Under Trump
"Working Americans increasingly report that their paychecks can't keep up with Trump's high prices, but are not confident they’ll be able to find better opportunities," noted one Groundwork Collaborative expert.
Jul 02, 2026
As President Donald Trump's team on Thursday tried to paint the June jobs report as positive, economists and congressional Democrats called it "weak" and "disappointing," with some also ripping the Republican administration's harmful policies, from sweeping tariffs and the Iran War to the mass detention and deportation of immigrants.
The nation's economy added just 57,000 jobs in June, or roughly half of what economists had anticipated, according to the latest monthly report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS noted that "both the unemployment rate, at 4.2%, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.1 million, changed little in June."
The Department of Labor (DOL) agency also revised job gains down for May by 43,000 and April by 31,000, and said that "over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.5%." That's notably lower than the 4.2% annual inflation rate detailed by BLS a few weeks ago, as Americans struggle to afford groceries, housing, and other basic necessities during Trump's second term.
"Today's weak jobs numbers are grim warning signs of a struggling labor market," Alex Jacquez, a former Obama administration official who is now Groundwork Collaborative's chief of policy and advocacy, said in a statement.
"Job gains reflect temporary seasonal hires and other workers separated from the broader economy while the majority of the labor force is frozen," he explained. "Working Americans increasingly report that their paychecks can't keep up with Trump's high prices, but are not confident they'll be able to find better opportunities. They're instead focused on trying to keep up with the president's price hikes."
Angela Hanks, a former DOL senior official who's now chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation, similarly called the report "yet more evidence of a fragile economy under President Trump, with job growth coming in well below expectations and sizable downward revisions to the last two months."
"While the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 4.2%, this number only tells us how many people are working—it doesn't tell you whether people can afford to live," she stressed. "The reality behind today's jobs numbers is that the cost of living continues to outpace paychecks: 43% of Americans now say they're worse off financially than they were a year ago, and year-over-year wage growth came in at 3.5%, below overall inflation of 4.2%—meaning that real wages are falling."
"Looking beyond the topline numbers, more than half of all June job growth was concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, continuing a trend of these sectors propping up much of our economy," she pointed out. "The labor force participation rate declined sharply and widely, with nearly every demographic group seeing declines, which partially explains the drop in the unemployment rate. Moreover, certain racial and age disparities actually worsened: Black youth unemployment rate rose to a whopping 26.8%, as did Hispanic youth unemployment, coming in at 20.1%—a reminder that this economy is not delivering for workers who are struggling the most."
Hanks added that “while Trump will surely tout this moderate job growth as a win, not long ago numbers like today's would have prompted serious concern. But families aren't grading Trump on a curve: They feel the impacts of this administration's chaotic and costly economic policies every day. Until working people can actually afford their lives—groceries, housing, healthcare, childcare—claims of a 'strong economy' will continue to ring hollow."
In line with Hanks' prediction, Trump's messengers attempted to frame the figures positively, with his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, celebrating the declining foreign-born labor force amid the administration's deadly crackdown on immigrants, and her deputy, Kush Desai, claiming the report "reinforces that the American labor market remains solid."
Acting Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling—whom the president earlier this week nominated for the permanent post—said that "Trump's America first agenda continues to provide greater wages for workers and certainty to the sectors which will fuel the next 250 years of US economic security."
Meanwhile, with the midterm elections just four months away, the Democratic National Committee's rapid response director, Kendall Witmer, declared that "Donald Trump's failed economic agenda has driven working families into a corner as Americans worry about how to find a job and keep up with sky-high prices. The reality for working families is undeniable: Trump has wrecked the economy, leaving millions wondering how they will make ends meet with no relief in sight."
"But Trump doesn't give a shit—he's only focused on building his vanity projects and using the power of the presidency to get even richer," added Witmer, just two days after the president's annual financial disclosures revealed that he pocketed an unprecedented $2.2 billion—over half of it from his family’s cryptocurrency grift—during his first year back in the Oval Office.
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) took to social media over "another disappointing jobs report" and also called out GOP priorities, from erecting a giant arch in Trump's honor to putting his name on various items, including passports and the $250 bill.
As Lieu concluded, "November is coming."
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